BRIDGING RESEARCH AND PRACTICE ON PERSONAL PRODUCTIVITY | By Jill Duffy

Category: email

Workers are interrupted by email 96 times in an 8-hour day. It takes 25 minutes to resume a prior task after an email interruptions. The numbers are shocking, but are they reliable?… Read More Why Are Email Stats So Shocking?

The advice to quit email, whether that means getting rid of all internal company email or just quitting your email application while you’re working, more often than not meets a harsh reply: “No. I can’t.” Is there evidence that the advice is any good in the first place? And more importantly, when people have given… Read More Is Quitting Email Possible?

Quick switches away from your primary task could cost you more than 2 hours of distracted time. And that’s not per day. That’s per switch! What’s going on with task-switching, and is it as unproductive as it seems?… Read More How Much Time Do We Lose Task-Switching?

Why is email such a headache? Email is consistently named one of the biggest distractions, an unproductive waste of time for knowledge workers, and a huge source of stress. In this special series on email and productivity, I’ve highlighted several major problems with email that cause workers to hate it so much. I’ve already noted… Read More What’s Wrong With Email Part 4: False Sense of Urgency

With email, most people receive more than they send (Renaud, 2006). Take a minute to wrap your head around that fact, and think about whether it’s true for you. Now consider that new email messages are often obligations that carry a cost (as I noted in Part 1 of this series on email and productivity).… Read More What’s Wrong With Email? Part 2: We Get More Than We Give